Iphigenie auf Tauris, Tanztheater Wuppertal, Sadler's Wells, review

The agony behind the story engages Bausch to created pure dance. Rating: * * *
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This dance-opera was the second work Pina Bausch made for her new company, way back in 1973, and to see it now is a fascinating demonstration both of where she had come from — and where she was heading.

She takes an opera by Gluck, which retells the Greek legend of Iphigenie, daughter of Agamemnon, who nearly sacrifices her lost brother Orestes without knowing who he is, and places among the measured Baroque tones an expressionistic depiction of the emotions and characters involved.

Whereas later, as she developed her ideas of dance theatre, Bausch used speech and minimal steps in her creations, this is pure dance. Instead of speaking themselves, the performers seem to channel the singers who surround them (perhaps slightly too far away in this staging at Sadler’s Wells).

But it isn’t the strict narrative that engages Bausch; it is the agony behind the story (sung in German), suggested rather than expressed by the music.

Through stark, sculptural images the work builds its power. So, when we first meet Ruth Amarante’s Iphigenie, she is already haunted by a graphic vision of her father’s death at the hands of her mother – a body raised from a bath, a red scarf draped around his neck. Her despair and loneliness are revealed by melting movements, her arm raised repeatedly to the heavens which do not hear her.

Her acolytes move in simple groupings that conjure Greek friezes. At one moment, they recall the grave bayadères of Petipa in a long line of bending arabesques; at others they fold their heads on to their hands in pyramid-shapes, like the girls in Nijinska’s Les Noces.

Bausch, pupil of choreographers Limón, Tudor and Jooss, is tipping her hat to dance history.

When Orestes (Pablo Aran Gimeno) appears with his friend Pylades (Damiano Ottavio Bigi), their dependence is shown by duets of entwined tenderness; Orestes cradled like a fallen Christ unfolds his limbs in slow motion or collapses in solemn melancholy. Their movement is deliberate, stylised, mythical.

Each of the opera’s four acts, designed by Bausch with Jürgen Dreier and Rolf Borzik, has its own character. In the final sequence, against a white cyclorama, Amarante, now in black, subsides into stillness and silence as she waits for what is to come. A dancer strews white flowers. Orestes brings on the ladder that will take him to the altar.

The intensity created is broken by the sudden, overwhelming moment of recognition — a moment all the stronger for the way it leads not to a duet, but to a clinging embrace. The orchestra and soloists, conducted by Jan Michael Horstmann, go on to sing of triumph, but it is that frozen tableau of tentative survival that lingers in the air.

Before Bausch died in 2009, she had decided that Iphigenie auf Tauris should finally come to London (before it had only been seen at the Edinburgh Festival).

You can understand why she wanted this pivotal work to be more widely seen: it is a huge undertaking to stage, but its value lies not only in its own fierce beauty and rich allusiveness but also in the insight it gives into the development of a woman whose vision transformed dance.